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Kickstarter is an amazing crowd-funding system that lets inventors, artists – makers of all kinds – describe their dream project and define a financial goal that they must reach in order to get their project into production. The hoards of tasteful internet folk who believe in the vision and want a piece of the action can put their money down (typically between $10-$100). If and only if the declared minimum funding amount is reached, the project gets the green light and the money.

Kickstarter is full of success stories of the little people who would never get funded by professional investors.

What’s also starting to happen is big names are turning to this sort of funding model for adventurous or niche projects. If they have a reputation they can bank on it.

The key ingredient for a successful project is a compelling and convincing video and a big enough crowd of believers.

One such big name is epic historical science fiction author Neal Stephenson. I don’t want to give anything away about the project since it’s more fun to watch the video about it: